Centerville farmer divides time between USB decisions and fieldwork planning

Tim Ostrem’s alarm jars him awake at 3:30 a.m. to catch an early flight out of St. Louis following a meeting of the United Soybean Board (USB), of which Ostrem is a board member. During the flight home, with daylight lengthening and snow – what little there is – disappearing, Ostrem shifts his thoughts to planting preparation, which the Centerville farmer begins a little earlier each year.

“Yeah, well, I used to always plant on May 1^st,” said Ostrem, after arriving back at his farm. “Nowadays, your goal is April 15^th and, in some cases, if the conditions are right, maybe you’d even go a little bit earlier, but most of the time, I try to be going by April 20^th. So that’s only a month away.”

So far, conditions appear to be favorable for planting, albeit with almost no moisture reserves. Still, the question stirs memories from a year ago – planting season 2024.

“We had rain that would never quit. We had fields completely submerged in flooding and had complete losses on several of them that were on the Vermillion River bottom,” he said. “Then come the end of July, the rain shut off and [we] didn’t hardly get anything, so we were really dry going into winter and we have not had any snow cover. But we did get some rain last night so, provided nothing crazy happens, we should have good planting conditions at least to start the crop, but we do not have much subsoil moisture.”

This is the third year Ostrem has farmed almost tillage-free, investing in technology and sharpening his precision planting skills to improve outcomes with early planting.

“That’s one of the reasons why I changed my operation,” explained Ostrem. “I did trade to buy a new planter and get the new technology for planting in no-till situations to get the ability to plant a little faster if I need to. I’m trying to gain expertise in that and use it to my advantage.”

An extended period of soft commodity markets makes it necessary to carefully weigh input applications, which Ostrem observes, are slightly lower-priced.

“Well, they’re better than they were,” said Ostrem, referring to the cost of inputs. “Some of the prices have come down, but then our returns with prices of commodities certainly have dropped from what they were several years ago. And when the margins are as tight as they are, you have to be very strategic in those decisions.”

Ostrem has found it necessary to upgrade his navigation technology to a subscription model that improves the precision of planting and harvest.

“We’re fine-tuning our fertilizing numbers and prescription maps. [For] precision agriculture we’re getting our planter set up to do RTK (Real-Time Kinematic satellite navigation), making sure that we have everything ready to go so that when the time comes, we don’t have glitches, and we can actually get our fields planted in a quick and timely fashion and hopefully get them all in there without planting delays.”

Ostrem is a veteran of the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council board. He has since taken on his nationwide role, serving as a South Dakota director on the USB, the body in charge of collecting and distributing Soybean Checkoff funds. Following the USB meeting in St. Louis, Ostrem told the South Dakota Soybean Network that lower commodity markets have resulted in a tightening of Soybean Checkoff dollars, explaining that there are simply fewer funds for research and promotion.

“Unfortunately, that means making cuts to some of the research projects that we would like to do,” he said. “Perhaps [some projects will] have to be put off for a year, or actually take a stop approach to them and say, ‘come back to us with it next year and we’ll see what we can do,’ and that’s what I spent all week doing this week was making the decisions of which ones get funded, or what percentage of funding they will receive from us.”

Ostrem pointed out areas of high importance, such as those he said will advance the disappearance of a large amount of soybean meal expected to be generated by growing domestic soybean crush, thus making money for soybean growers. Those areas, he said, need to remain a Checkoff focus.

“So we want to make sure that we keep that priority as high as we can and look at the avenues that offer the best chance of doing that,” he said, “whether it’s in livestock production, which has been growing. Our exports of meat worldwide have been growing, so that’s a bright spot.”

Another United Soybean Board priority, according to Ostrem, is the Checkoff-funded U.S. Soybean Export Council.

“They’ve been doing a good job of trying to find new markets [and] expanding the markets that are already there,” he said. “With China backing down and using more Brazilian beans, that’s why we’ve been trying to go into new areas and develop those.

When Ostrem became a USB director, he found it to be a different experience after several years of service on the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council.

“At the state level, you’re involved basically in every aspect of the decision-making for the whole board. Now at USB, with 77 board members doing the load instead of nine members at the state level, you dwell on specific areas of Checkoff spending, and you can get into the weeds more in-depth in that regard,” said Ostrem. “But ultimately, both boards are doing the same objective – research and promotion."